Festival Overview – Parklife

Parklife is quickly becoming one of the unmissable dance events of the year. The second weekend of June will see Heaton Park in Manchester transformed into a venue that offers such a wide array of genres that it’s almost too hard to list. The 1975 return to their home city off the back of a Worldwide success of an album, putting Manchester on the music map. Frank Ocean will be showing off his new album ‘Blonde’ with a taste of idiosyncratic rap from across the Atlantic. There’s pop acts like Jess Glynne and Zara Larsson, grime from Stormzy, and dance from Eric Prydz and Pete Tong. If you’re not bothered about genre and just want to hear good music, Rag’N’Bone Man, Chaka Khan, George Ezra, Fatboy Slim, London Gramma, Wiley, Mura Masa and Two Door Cinema Club will be taking their places on stages throughout the Manchester festival. It’s the all you can eat buffet of festivals, with full weekend tickets starting from just £99.50.

Parklife pays tribute to the glory days of Madchester; the music scene that mixed alternative and psychedelic rock with electro dance. It led to the rise of bands like The Stone Roses, Oasis and, you guessed it, The Chemical Brothers. This scene essentially paved the way for the Gay Village and the Northern Quarter, which remain some of the most vibrant clubbing districts in the country. It almost makes sense then that Heaton Park doesn’t have camping facilities. It’s situated so close to the incredible nightlife of Manchester that it doesn’t really matter. A night out in the home of Britpop beats a tent in the park on any weekend.

If you’re after more than music, then Parklife has you covered. Sponsors, The Warehouse Project, boast that there’ll be ‘street food heroes hand-picked from all corners of the UK’, and ‘Roaming Performers providing extrasensory, animalistic and experimental entertainment’. If that’s not mad enough for you, then we don’t know what is.

The Megabus stop at Shudehill Interchange is a mere 15-minute drive from Heaton Park, and is surrounded by affordable hotels and countless options of clubs and bars. If the Parklife official website is anything to go by, then we gather this could get messy.